worth in their own conceits, that they may begin to take you to be unsuitable for them, and unmeet for their further special friendship. Alas, poor man, they will pity thee that thou art no wiser, and that thou hast no greater light to change thy mind as fast as they, or that thou art so weak and ignorant as not to see what seems to them so clear a truth; or that thou art so simple to cast away thyself by crossing them that might prefer thee, or to fall under the displeasure of those that have power to raise or ruin thee: but if thou be so simple, thou mayest be the object of their lamentations, but art no familiar friend for them. They think it fittest to close and converse with those of their own rank and stature, and not with such children, that may prove their trouble and dishonour. 7. Some of your friends will think that by a more thorough acquaintance with you, they have found out more of your infirmities or faults; and therefore have found that you are less amiable and valuable than at first they judged you: they will think that by distance, unacquaintedness, and an overhasty love and judgment, they were mistaken in you; and that now they see reason to repent of the love which they think was guilty of some errors and excess: when they come nearer you, and have had more trial of you, they will think they are fitter to judge of you than before indeed, our defects are so many, and all our infirmities so great, that the more men know us, the more they may see in us that deserves pity or reproof; and as pictures, we appear less beautiful at the nearest view: though this will not warrant the withdrawing of that love which is due to friends, and to virtue, even in the imperfect nor will excuse that alienation, and decay of friendship that is caused by the pride of such as overlook perhaps much greater failings and weaknesses in themselves, which need forgiveness. 8. Perhaps some of your friends will grow weary of their friendship, having that infirmity of human nature, not to be much pleased with one thing long. Their love is a flower that quickly withers: it is a short-lived thing that soon grows old. It must be novelty that must feed their love and their delight. 9. Perhaps they may have got some better friends in their apprehensions, they may have so much interest as to take them up, and leave no room for ancient friends. It may be, they have met with those that are more suitable, or can be more useful to them: that have more learning, or wit, or wealth, or power than you have, and therefore seem more worthy of their friendship. 10. Some of them may think when you are in a low and suffering state, and in danger of worse, that it is part of their duty of self-preservation to be strange to you, though in heart they wish you well. They will think they are not bound to hazard themselves upon the displeasure of superiors, to own or befriend you, or any other: though they must not desert Christ, they think they may desert a man for their own preservation. To avoid both extremes in such a case, men must both study to understand which way is most serviceable to Christ, and to his church, and withal, to be able to deny themselves, and also must study to understand what Christ means in his final sentence, Inasmuch as you did it (or did it not) to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it (or did it not) to me.' As if it were to visit the contagious, we must neither cast away our lives to do no good, or for that which in value holds no proportion with them; nor yet must we deny to run any hazard when it is indeed our duty: so is it in our visiting those that suffer for the cause of Christ: only here the owning them being the confessing of him, we need more seldom to fear being too forward. 11. Some of your friends may cover their unfaithfulness with the pretence of some fault that you have been guilty of, some error that you hold, or some unhandsome or culpable act that you have done, or some duty that you have left undone or failed in. For they think there is not a better shelter for unfaithfulness, than to pretend for it the name and cause of God, and so to make a duty of their sin. Who would not justify them, if they can but prove that God requires them, and religion obliges them, to forsake you for your faults? There are few crimes in the world that by some are not fathered on God, that most hates them, as thinking no name can so much honour them. False friends therefore use this means as well as other hypocrites: and though God is love, and condemns nothing more than uncharitableness and malice, yet these are commonly by false-hearted hypocrites called by some pious, virtuous names, and God himself is entitled to them: so that few worldlings, ambitious persons or time-servers, but will confidently pretend religion for all their falsehood to their friends, or bloody cruelty to the servants of Christ who comply not with their carnal interest. 12. Perhaps some of your friends may really mistake your case, and think that you suffer as evil-doers, and instead of comforting you, may be your sharpest censurers: this is one of the most notable things set out to our observation in the book of Job: it was not the smallest part of his affliction, that when the hand of God was heavy upon him, and then if ever was the time for his friends to have been his comforters, and friends indeed; on the contrary they became his scourge, and by unjust accusations, and misinterpretations of the providence of God, did greatly add to his affliction! When God had taken away his children, wealth, and health, his friends would take away the reputation and comfort of his integrity; and under pretence of bringing him to repentance, did charge him with that which he was never guilty of: they wounded his good name, and would have wounded his conscience, and deprived him of his inward peace: censorious, false, accusing friends, cut deeper than malicious, slandering enemies: it is no wonder, if strangers or enemies misjudge and misreport our actions: but when your bosom friends, that should most intimately know you, and be the chief witnesses of your innocence against all others, shall in their jealousy or envy, or peevishness, or falling out, be your chief reproachers and unjust accusers, as it makes it seem more credible to others, so it will come nearest to yourselves. Yet this is a thing that must be expected; yea, even your most self-denying acts of obedience to God, may be so misunderstood by godly men, and real friends, as by them to be taken for your great miscarriage, and turned to your rebuke: as David's dancing before the ark was by his wife; which yet did but make him resolve to be yet more vile. If you be cast into poverty, or disgrace, or prison, or banishment, for your necessary obedience to Christ, perhaps your friend or wife may become your accuser for this your greatest service, and say, This is your own doing your rashness, or indiscretion, or self-conceitedness, or wilfulness hath brought it upon you: what need had you to say such words, or to do this or that? Why could not you have yielded in so small a matter? Perhaps your costliest and most excellent obedience shall by your nearest friends be called the fruits of pride, or humour, or passion, or some corrupt affection, or at least of folly or inconsiderateness. When flesh and blood hath long been striving in you against your duty, and saying, Do not cast away thyself: O serve not God at so dear a rate: God doth not require thee to undo thyself: why shouldst thou not avoid so great inconveniences? When with much ado you have conquered all your carnal reasonings, and denied yourselves and your carnal interests, you must expect, even from some religious friends, to be accused for these very ac tions, and perhaps their accusations may fasten such a blot upon your names, as shall never be washed out till the day of judgment. By difference of interests, or apprehensions, and by unacquaintedness with your hearts and actions, the righteousness of the righteous may be thus taken from him, and friends may do the work of enemies, yea, of satan himself, the accuser of the brethren; and may prove as thorns in your bed, and gravel in your shoes, yea, in your eyes, and wrong you much more than open adversaries could have done. How it is likely to go with that man's reputation, you may easily judge, whose friends are like Job's and his enemies like David's, that lay snares before him, and diligently watch for matter of reproach: yet this may befall the best of men. 13. You may be permitted by God to fall into some real crime, and then your friends may possibly think it is their duty to disown you, so far as you have wronged God: when you provoke God to frown upon you, he may cause your friends to frown upon you: if you will fall out with him, and grow strange to him, no marvel if your truest friends fall out with you, and grow strange to you. They love you for your godliness, and for the sake of Christ; and therefore must abate their love, if you abate your godliness: and must, for the sake of Christ, be displeased with you for your sins. If in such a case of real guilt, you should be displeased at their displeasure, and should expect that your friend should befriend your sin, or carry himself towards you in your guilt, as if you were innocent, you will but show that you understand not the nature of true friendship, nor the use of a true friend: and are yet yourselves too friendly to your sins. 14. Moreover, those few friends that are truest to you, may be utterly unable to relieve you in your distress, or to give you ease, or do you any good. The case may be such that they can but pity you, lament your sorrows, and weep over you: you may see in them that man is not as God, whose friendship can accomplish all the goed that he desires to his friends. The wisest and greatest and best of men are miserable comforters, and ineffectual helps you may be sick, pained, grieved, and distressed, notwithstanding any thing that they can do for you: nay, perhaps in their ignorance, they may increase your misery, while they desire your relief; and by striving indirectly to help and ease you, may tie the knot faster and make you worse. They may provoke those more against you that oppress you, while they think they speak that : which should tend to make you free: they may think to ease your troubled minds by such words as shall increase the trouble: or to deliver you as Peter would have delivered Christ, and saved his Saviour, first by carnal counsel, Be it far from thee, Lord; this shall not be unto thee.' Then by carnal unjust force, by drawing his sword against the officers; love and good meaning will not prevent the mischiefs of ignorance and mistake. Many thousand sick people are killed by their friends that attend them, with an earnest desire of their life: while they ignorantly give them that which is contrary to their disease, and will not be the less pernicious for the good meaning of the giver. Who have more tender affections than mothers to their children? Yet a great part of the calamity of the world of sickness, and the misery of man's life, proceeds from the ignorant and erroneous indulgence of mothers to their children, who, to please them, let them eat and drink what they will, and use them to excess and gluttony in their childhood, till nature be abused, mastered, and clogged with those superfluities and crudities which are the cause of most of the following diseases of their lives. I might here also remind you how your friends may themselves be overcome with a temptation, and then become the more dangerous tempters of you, by how much the greater their interest is in your affections. If they be infected with error, they are the likeliest persons to ensnare you: if they be tainted with covetousness or pride, there is none so likely to draw you to the same sin: so your friends may be in effect your most deadly enemies, deceivers and destroyers. 15. If you have friends that are never so firm and constant, they may prove not only unable to relieve you, but even additions to your grief. If they are afflicted in the participation of your sufferings, as your troubles are become theirs, so their trouble for you will become yours, and so the stock of your sorrow will be increased. They are mortals, and liable to distress as well as you. Therefore they are like to bear their share in several sorts of sufferings: so friendship will make their sufferings to be yours: their sicknesses and pains, their fears and griefs, their wants and dangers, will all be yours. The more they are your hearty friends, the more they will be yours. So you will have as many additions to the proper burden of your griefs, as you have suffering friends: when you but hear that they are dead, you say as Thomas, 'let us also go that we may die with him.' Having many such friends you will almost always have one or other of them in distress; and so be seldom free from sorrow; besides all that which is properly your own. 16. Lastly, If you have a friend that is both true and useful, yet you may be sure he must stay with you but a little while. 'The godly men will cease, and the faithful fail from among the children of men; while men of lying flattering lips, and double hearts, survive, and the wicked walk on every side, while the vilest men are exalted;' while swarms of false malicious men, are left round about you, perhaps God will take away your dearest friends: if among a multitude of unfaithful ones, you have but one that is your friend indeed, perhaps God will take away that one. He may be separated from you into another country; or taken away to God by death. Not that God doth grudge you the mercy of a faithful friend, but that he would be your all, and would not have you hurt yourselves with too much affection to any creature, and for other reasons to be named. To be forsaken of your friends, is not all your affliction: but to be so forsaken is a great aggravation of it. (1.) For they use to forsake us in our greatest sufferings and straits, when we have the greates need of them. (2.) They fail us most at a dying hour, when all other worldly comfort fails: as we must leave our houses, lands and wealth, so must we for the present leave our friends: as all the rest are feeble comforters, when we have once received our citation to appear before the Lord, so also are our friends but silly comforters: they can weep over us, but they cannot with all their care delay the separating stroke of death one day or hour. Only by their prayers, and holy advice, reminding us of everlasting things, and provoking us in the work of preparation, they may prove to us friends indeed. Therefore we must value a holy, heavenly, faithful friend, as one of the greatest treasures upon earth. While we take notice how as men they may forsake us, we must not deny but that as saints they are precious, and of singular use to us; and Christ uses by them to communicate his mercies; and if any creatures in the world may be blessings to us, it is holy persons, that have most of God in their hearts and lives. (3.) It is an aggravation of the cross, that they often fail us when we are most faithful in our duty, and stumble most upon the most excellent acts of our obedience. (4.) Those are the persons that oft-times fai us, of whom we have deserved best, and from | grief, from whom you had the highest expectawhom we might have expected most. tions. Are you better than Job, or David, or Christ? and are your friends more firm and unchangeable than theirs. Consider, 1. That creatures must be set at a sufficient distance from their Creator. All-sufficiency, immutability, and insoluble fidelity, are proper to Jehovah. As it is no wonder for the sun to set, or be eclipsed, as glorious a body as it is, so it is no wonder for a friend, a pious friend, to fail us, for a time, in the hour of our distress. There are some that will not: but there is none but may, if God should leave them to their weakness. Man is not your rock: he hath no stability but what is derived, dependent, uncertain, and defective. Learn therefore to Review the experiences of the choicest servants that Christ hath had in the world, and you shall find enough to confirm you of the vanity of man, and the instability of the dearest friends. How highly was Athanasius esteemed? and yet at last deserted and banished by the famous Constantine himself! How excellent a man was Gregory Nazianzen, and highly valued in the church? and yet by reproach and discouragements driven away from his church at Constantinople whither he was chosen, and envied by the bishops round about him. How worthy a man was the eloquent Chrysostom, and highly valued in the church? and yet how bitterly was he prosecuted by Hierom and Epiphanius; rest on God alone, and lean not too hard or conand banished, and died in a second banish-fidently upon any mortal man. ment, by the provocation of factious, conten- 2. God will have the common infirmity of man tious bishops, and an empress impatient of to be known, that so the weakest may not be his plain reproofs ? What person more gen- utterly discouraged, nor take their weakness to erally esteemed and honoured for learning, be gracelessness, whilst they see that the strongpiety, and peaceableness, than Melanchthon? est also have their infirmities, though not so great and yet by the contentions of Illyricus and his as theirs. If any of God's servants live in conparty, he was made weary of his life. As highly stant holiness and fidelity, without any shakings as Calvin was deservedly valued at Geneva, yet or stumbling in their way, it would tempt some once in a popular lunacy and displeasure, they self-accusing troubled souls, to think that they drove him out of their city, and in contempt of were altogether graceless, because they are so him some called their dogs by the name of Cal- far short of others. But when we read of Peter's vin; though after they were glad to intreat him denying his master in so horrid a manner, with to return. How much our Grindal and Abbot swearing and cursing, that he knew not the man, were esteemed, it appears by their advancement and of his dissimulation and not walking upto the archbishopric of Canterbury: and yet who rightly, and of David's unfriendly and unrightknows not that their eminent piety sufficed not eous dealing with Mephibosheth, the seed of to keep them from dejecting frowns! If you say, Jonathan: and of his most vile and treacherous that it is no wonder if with princes through in- dealing with Uriah, a faithful and deserving subterest, and with people through levity, it be thus; ject; it may both abate our wonder and offence I might heap up instances of the like unsteadi- at the unfaithfulness of our friends, and teach us ness of particular friends: but all history, and to compassionate their frailty, when they desert the experiences of the most, so much abound us; and also somewhat abate our immoderate with them, that I think it needless. Which of dejection and trouble, when we have failed tous must not say, with David, that all men are ward God or man ourselves. liars, that is, deceitful and unfaithful, either through weakness or insufficiency; that either will forsake us, or cannot help us in the time of need? Was Christ forsaken in his extremity by his own disciples, to teach us what to expect, or bear? Think it not strange then to be conformed to your Lord, in this, as well as in other parts of his humiliation. Expect that men should prove deceitful; not that you should entertain censorious suspicions of your particular friends: but remember in general that man is frail, and the best too selfish and uncertain; and that it is no wonder if those should prove your greates 3. Moreover, consider, how the odiousness of that sin, which is the root and cause of such unfaithfulness, is greatly manifested by the failing of our friends. God will have the odiousness of the remnants of our self-love and carnal-mindedness, and cowardice appear: we should not discern it in the seed and root, if we did not see and taste it in the fruits. Seeing without tasting will not sufficiently convince us: a crab looks as beautiful as an apple ; but when you taste it, you better know the difference. When you must yourselves be unkindly used by your friends, and forsaken by them in your distress, and you have tasted the fruits of the remnants of their worldliness, selfishness and carnal fears, you will better know the odiousness of these vices, which thus break forth against all obligations to God and you, and notwithstanding the light, the conscience, and perhaps the grace, that resists them. 4. Are you not prone to over-value and over. love your friends? If so, is not this the proper remedy for your disease. In the loving of God, we are in no danger of excess; and therefore have no need of any thing to quench it. In the loving of the godly, purely upon the account of Christ, and in loving saints as saints, we are not apt to go too far. But yet our understandings may mistake, and we may think that saints have more of sanctity than indeed they have; and we are exceedingly apt to mix a selfish, common love, with that which is spiritual and holy; and at the same time, when we love a Christian as a Christian, we are apt not only to love him, as we ought, but to over-love him because he is our friend, and loves us. Those Christians who have no special love to us, we are apt to undervalue, and neglect and love them below their holiness and worth but those that we think entirely love us, we love above their proper worth, as they stand in the esteem of God: not but that we may love those that love us, and add this love to that which is purely for the sake of Christ; but we should not let our own interest prevail and over-turn the interest of Christ, nor love any so much for loving us, as for loving Christ: and if we do so, no wonder if God shall use such remedies as he sees meet, to abate our excess of selfish love, O how highly are we apt to think of all that good which is found in those who most highly value us, and most dearly love us; when perhaps in itself it is but some ordinary good, or ordinary degree of goodness which is in them! Their love to us irresistibly procures our love to them: and when we love them, it is wonderful to observe how easily we are brought to think well of almost all they do, and highly to value their judgments, graces, parts and work : when greater excellencies in another perhaps are scarcely observed, or regarded but as a common thing. Therefore the destruction or want of love is apparent in the vilifying thoughts and speeches, that most men have of one another; and in the low esteem of the judgments, and performances, and lives of other men: much more in their contempt, reproaches and cruel persecutions. Now though God will have us increase in our love of Christ in his members, and in our pure love of Christians, as such, and in our common charity to all, yea, and in our just fidelity to our friend; yet would he have us suspect and moderate our selfish and excessive love, and inordinate, partial esteem of one above another, when it is but for ourselves, and on our own account. Therefore as he will make us know, that we ourselves are no such excellent persons, as that it should make another so laudable, or advance his worth, because he loves us ; so he will make us know, that our friends, whom we over-value, are but like other men: if we exalt them too highly in our esteem, it is a sign that God must cast them down; and as their love to us, was it that made us so exalt them: so their unkindness or unfaithfulness to us, is the fittest means to bring them lower in our estimation and affection. God is very jealous of our hearts, as to our over-valuing and over-loving any of his creatures: what we give inordinately and excessively to them, is some way or other taken from him, and given them to his injury, and therefore to his offence. Though I know that to be void of natural, friendly, or social affections, is an odious extreme on the other side; yet God will rebuke us if we are guilty of excess. It is the greater and more inexcusable fault to over-love the creature because our love to God is so cold, and so hardly kindled and kept alive! He cannot take it well to see us dote upon dust and frailty like ourselves, at the same time when all his wondrous kindness, and attractive goodness, cause but such a faint and languid love to him, which we ourselves can scarcely feel. If therefore he cure us by permitting our friends to show us truly what they are, and how little they deserve such excessive love, when God hath so little, it is no more wonder, than it is that he is tender of his glory, and merciful to his servants' souls. 5. By the failing and unfaithfulness of our friends, the wonderful patience of God will be observed and honoured as it is showed both to them and us. When they forsake us in our distress, especially when we suffer for the cause of Christ, it is God that they injure more than us; and therefore if he bear with them, and forgive their weakness upon repentance, why should not we do so, that are much less injured? The world's perfidiousness should make us think, how great and wonderful is the patience of God, that bears with, and bears up so vile, ungrateful, treacherous men that abuse him to whom they are infinitely obliged? And it should make us consider, when men deal treacherously with us, how great is that mercy that hath borne with, and pardoned greater wrongs, which I myself have done to God, than these can be which men have |